Trump proposes more cuts to Interior agencies
Laura Lundquist
(Missoula Current) Once again, the federal budget process has begun, and President Donald Trump’s budget request makes even deeper cuts into programs struggling to preserve public lands, water, fish and wildlife.
On Friday, the White House released a budget for fiscal year 2027, prepared by the Office of Management and Budget, along with six fact sheets highlighting Trump’s budget priorities, such as “Ending the Green New Scam.”
Among this year's top-line issues, the president and OMB director Russell Vought seek to increase the Department of Defense budget by 42% over the $1 trillion approved in the fiscal year 2026 budget dubbed the Big Beautiful Bill. They would also funnel an additional $350 billion to increase “access to critical munitions and further expansion of the defense industrial base.”
Conversely, they would decrease non-defense spending by another $73 billion through “reducing or eliminating woke, weaponized and wasteful programs,” according to the fact sheets.
The cuts include a 13% reduction in last year’s already reduced budget for the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, among others. Some conservation organizations are speaking out against the way the White House has parsed the $16 billion allocated to the Interior.
The Interior Department now oversees the Wildland Fire Service, which is a consolidation of all wildfire divisions from various federal agencies. While the consolidation might save some money on paper by eliminating some duplication, critics argue that the Fire Service will probably need more money overall, particularly in this year of western drought, so the cuts to the Interior budget will be borne unequally by other agencies.
“Trying to build a new unified wildfire service while also reorganizing the Forest Service is like trying to give your car a tire rotation at highway speeds. It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” said Aaron Weiss, Center for Western Priorities deputy director.
The National Parks Conservation Association noted that the president’s budget also takes a second swipe at the National Park Service budget, including a 25% reduction to park operations funding, “likely eliminating thousands more park staff after a year of severe losses,” according to the organization’s news release.
Since January 2025, the Park Service has lost nearly 25% of its workforce – over 4,000 staff – due to pressured resignations, early retirements and ongoing barriers to hiring. This follows a 13% decline in park staff since 2011, even as visitation has risen 19%, topping 323 million visits in 2025, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.
In the meantime, Trump wants to create a Presidential Capital Stewardship Fund, a $10 billion mandatory fund within the Park Service budget to pay for construction, maintenance and beautification projects in Washington, D.C. Trump also wants to continue funding for an increased presence of the U.S. Park Police in D.C.
Trump acknowledged that a lot of deferred maintenance remains in parks across the nation, so he’s proposed that international visitors pay an additional surcharge to access the most visited national parks. He also proposed reauthorizing the Legacy Restoration Fund at $1.9 billion per year for five years to pay for deferred maintenance.
John Garder, Senior Director of Budget and Appropriations for the National Parks Conservation Association, was disappointed to see the Stewardship Fund would receive more than three times the annual budget of the National Park Service. Weiss called it a “presidential slush fund.”
“A cut this massive would be catastrophic. After a year of deep staffing cuts, dwindling resources, and attacks on history and science, park staff are already at the brink. Park maintenance needs are growing, protections are eroding, and visitor experience is declining. This proposal would only accelerate the damage, putting our national parks at even greater risk and further cutting the park staff needed to care for our national treasures,” Garder said in a release. “We support efforts to modernize and repair park infrastructure but not when it’s paired with massive cuts to Park Service operations.”
The president would cut the Fish and Wildlife Service budget to $1.3 billion, down 25% from the 2025 budget of $1.725 billion. That includes significant cuts to the National Wildlife Refuge System and Fisheries and Aquatic Resource Conservation funding. It would also cap the amount of money the Fish and Wildlife Service could spend on endangered species habitat designation at $1.6 million and limit funding to work on petitions to list species to a half-million dollars.
Trump would eliminate Fish and Wildlife Service State and Tribal Wildlife grants “that fund conservation already well managed by states, Tribes and other countries,” reducing total grant funding from $82 million in 2025 to $9 million.
The State Wildlife Grant Program was created in 2000 and the Tribal Wildlife Grant Program in 2001. States have used the grants to develop 10-year state wildlife action plans that identified more than 12,000 rare, declining and imperiled fish and wildlife across the nation and developed conservation actions, according to a 2020 FWS report. Armed with that information and a 25% match, Montana received $700,000 from the federal grant program to protect habitat needed to recover trumpeter swans. Montana is currently revising its wildlife action plan, but a 2015 version identified 128 species of greatest conservation need.
Other wildlife funds on the chopping block include the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, and the Multinational Species Conservation Fund, which allocated a few million to help save African elephants, rhinoceroses and tigers. Discretionary funding for the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund would be eliminated.
Finally, the president’s budget would consolidate the permitting offices of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “to streamline regulatory oversight and ensure a consistent approach to the management of protected species.” The offices were responsible for evaluating permit applications for actions or projects that might either harm or kill threatened or endangered species protected under two very different laws: the Endangered Species Act or the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Chris Westfall, Defenders of Wildlife government relations legislative counsel, said consolidation would leave the permitting office “without the needed resources to preserve scientific expertise, opens our lands and waters to extractive industries and hollows out the already strained workforce that provide crucial conservation work.”
“This proposed budget pushes us further in the wrong direction — potentially triggering even more staff layoffs and providing less resources for wildlife conservation, which are pivotal to recovering America’s imperiled species. Our nation’s lands and the wildlife that depend on them for habitat deserve better than to be ignored by agencies that are shells of their former selves,” Westfall said in a release.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.